The corner of Broad and Erie is the Times Square of North Philly, but instead of flashy signs pushing Kodak, Samsung, Canon or Virgin Airlines, you have stark billboards urging you to \u201cELIMINATE YOUR DEBT\u201d and \u201cREBUILD YOUR CREDIT.\u201d On utility poles, styrofoam signs promise, \u201cJOBS! $400-$600 PER WEEK. CALL TODAY, START TOMORROW.\u201d Is it legit? Ring to get sucked in, or you can stock your fridge, finally, by ditching your junk wheels for \u201c$400,\u201d according to one flyer, or \u201c$250-$400,\u201d per another. The biggest billboard touts \u201cRAND SPEAR 1-800-90-LEGAL. He Eats Insurance Companies for BREAKFAST!\u201d Are you aching all over, your skeleton permanently askew from that bus accident you weren\u2019t even involved in? Are you emotionally spavined from having to dodge that abruptly swinging door? Now you know who to call!<\/p>\n
With such signage, you know this is one broke neighborhood. The only high-rise is a long kaput National Bank of North Philadelphia. Its art deco grandeur gone to seeds, it\u2019s now a 14-story eyesore, with all its windows broken or spray painted. On its sides are huge graffiti, FOREVER BONER. In fact, it\u2019s known colloquially as the Forever Boner building. Here, there is no Planet Hollywood, Forever 21 or Disney Store, only a 99\u00a2 DEAL outfit, with items for 59 and 79\u00a2 also, though their sign also claims, \u201cEVERYTHING 99\u00a2 OR MORE.\u201d With that logic, they can also flog a Lamborghini, though of course, in this hood, such whips only appear in rhymes. Hunched over on a beat up folding chair, a gypsy cabbie asks passersby, \u201cTaxi? Taxi?\u201d The Coke sign is broken. Crossing the street, a lanky man wears a \u201cMY PRESIDENT IS BLACK\u201d T-shirt, and here comes a middle-aged woman with consonants crowding her print blouse, SSSDDDMMMLLLRRRGGGFFF\u2026 She\u2019s going into Black and Nobel, an urban literature purveyor with titles like Curse by Darkness, Ghetto Girl Games, If My Pussy Could Talk, Ride or Die Chick, Preacherman Blues (by Jihad) and Ghetto Ballerina by Philly\u2019s own Tenia Jamilla. It\u2019s about this valedictorian chick turned stripper, then whore. She has two main snuggly buddies, one loaded yet shady, one square. On the side, she also muff dives. Will our grasping heroine choose to be wined and dined until her facade fades, sags and crumbles, just like the Forever Boner edifice, or will she lock herself inside some dumbass room night after night to study for a degree at Howard University? While deciding, she continues to muff dives. Soon, though, one of her live dildoes will be wetted, for real, straight up. Buy book to find out more. \u201cWE SHIP TO PRISON,\u201d states Black and Nobel sign.<\/p>\n
Curious about Jamilla, I NSAed her twitter page to find this tagline, \u201cToo Sexy and Too freaking smart\u2026\u201d I then clicked on a video to marvel at her bumptious assets seriously quaking to Wacka Flocka\u2019s \u201cWe Don\u2019t Fuck Wit Dat.\u201d Jamilla sang along, \u201cI don\u2019t fuck with fake jewelry. I don\u2019t fuck with fake clothes\u2026\u201d Atlanta verses are itee, I guess, but if you prefer more homegrown stuff, North Philly has plenty, as in Dark Lo\u2019s \u201cI fuck your girl once or twice, I don\u2019t keep her \/ Naggin\u2019 stalkin\u2019 ass bitch, I don\u2019t need her \/ Pussy has a funny smell, I don\u2019t eat her.\u201d Or the currently jump suited AR-AB, \u201cMy aim nice when I\u2019m tossin\u2019 lead \/ Eyes closed I\u2019d shoot a fly off your head.\u201d And, \u201cI\u2019m hard as hell and I got hard for sale \/ Trash day I\u2019m throwing bodies in the garbage pail.\u201d Just before he got draped in prison garb, AR-AB briefly swept a playground and visited elementary school classrooms to prove that he was \u201cmore of an asset outside than inside.\u201d Some people even signed a petition. It\u2019s not clear who, since by AR-AB\u2019s own admission, he \u201cain\u2019t got no friends \u2018cause they all been shot.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to get kids to care about poetry, you know, so you\u2019ve got to bring in a rhymer like AR-AB, someone they can relate to, being just down the block, and I don\u2019t mean just cell. As a daddy of four, he also knows how to communicate with children. \u201cTechs blast, chest splash, that\u2019s a mess right there!\u201d<\/p>\n
All of these images of butchery is making me damn hungry, dog, so let\u2019s eat. Well, we can have cheap chicken at Church\u2019s or Crown, or really, really cheap chicken at Checker\u2019s, and if you want to go upscale, a platter of short ribs at Dwight\u2019s, with two sides and corn bread, will set you back 17 bucks, but that\u2019s way out of my range, so you\u2019ll have to eat there alone, OK? We can also duck into the Clock Bar and get \u201cCOLOSSAL BUTTERFLY SHRIMPS. NOTHING LARGER,\u201d but its concussive rap will knock out our few remaining brain cells. Drooling ketchup, we\u2019ll collapse into an irreversible coma. Instead, let\u2019s just drink ourselves full at the Broad Street Tavern.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a mellow trough for old heads, with more R&B than rap, and even has Steely Dan in the jukebox. I know, I know, it\u2019s weird, but get over it. The music is rarely so loud, you can\u2019t talk. Often, there\u2019s no canned music at all, which is best. On the wall, a Miller Lite poster, \u201cWe Celebrate Black History Everyday! IT\u2019S Miller TIME,\u201d so to down pissy beer is to celebrate Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King? I discovered X my last year in high school, read all I could and wrote an essay, then composed another on him during my first year in college. Meet Chili Willie from North Philly. He comes here around 1:30PM each day. Sixty-nine-years-old, Chili served four years in Korea, one in Vietnam, where he fought in Khe Sanh, then Hue, during the Tet Offensive, \u201cI had buddies die in my arms.\u201d Tour over, he missed his flight out of Saigon, \u201cCause I was getting some pussy.\u201d In Korea, Chili fell in love with a Korean whore, \u201cShe was my woman. I gave her money for everything. Took care of her. We nearly got married.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy didn\u2019t you?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI told my sister about this, and she said, \u2018You should marry your own kind\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd you listened to her? You were your own man, man! You should have done what you wanted to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not exactly wise to wed a whore, though the Vietnamese have a saying, \u201cBetter to turn a whore into your wife, than your wife into a whore.\u201d Chilli continued, \u201cBut I listened to my family. After I was sent to Vietnam, my girlfriend thought I had died. Someone told her I had died. But I saw her after that. She was pregnant, you know, with my child.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou sure it was your kid?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDid you ever see this kid?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo. She got married to another GI, and moved to Hawaii.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo your kid\u2019s in Hawaii, with a stepfather?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think so.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Vietnam, Chili made extra cash by funneling American cigarettes and liquor to the black market. He even sold gas and diesel pilfered from the American base, \u201cI was a businessman, a hustler. I\u2019ve always known how to make money.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut you could have gotten into some serious shit!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chili served 22 years, one month and 5 days altogether. With his pension set, he could relax a bit back in North Philly, where he lived with his ma. Until five years ago, he drained half a gallon of vodka a day, \u201cand I could get two-dollar pussies up and down Erie Avenue.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTwo dollar pussies?! How much does it cost today?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know, cause I ain\u2019t buying no more.\u201d<\/p>\n
I asked Chili if it was weird to land in Vietnam, \u201cI mean, Vietnam is nothing like North Philly. Did you freak out when you first saw it. I was born and raised in Vietnam, and it still weirded me out when I returned there as an adult.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, it didn\u2019t freak me out, because I had a job to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chili did what he had to do, without flinching, at least not in this retelling. Now, America has a fully professional Army of sentient drones willing to be sent anywhere. In Africa, we have troops in 35 countries, and it\u2019s a safe bet most of these guys and gals have never heard of Djibouti, Mauritania, Burkina Faso or Seychelles, etc., until they got their marching orders. In Cheyenne, I chatted with a woman who thought her daughter was stationed in North Korea. In Philly, I saw a war veteran panhandling with a sign stating he was in \u201cSigon.\u201d Another had served in the \u201cGulph War.\u201d We sure don\u2019t need to know where we are to start shooting. Behind the anti-terror smoke screen, we have created a nation of paranoiacs and psychos. As we kill and rape, many of us rap about raping and killing.<\/p>\n
Leading me towards the back, Chili showed me a framed funeral program for one of his buddies, Ronald Joe French, with the deceased photographed in his Army dress uniform. Sunrise, 1942. Sunset, 2008. There is a long, uncredited poem, \u201cLast Request,\u201d with these lines: \u201cPlease don\u2019t say that I gave up, \/ just say that I gave in. \/ Don\u2019t say that I lost the battle, \/ for it was God\u2019s war to lose or win. \/ Please don\u2019t say how good I was, \/ but say I did my best. \/ Just say I tried to do what\u2019s right, \/ to give the most I could, not less [\u2026] \u201d While it\u2019s certainly no great literature, you can\u2019t argue against its sweet, reverent and humble sentiments, for they reflect positively on the dead man\u2019s family, and on all those who mourned him that day. What we hear and read reflect who we are. We are what we choose to hear and read.<\/p>\n
All over North Philly, you\u2019ll see these \u201cSugar to Shit\u201d stickers that steer you to the Reading Sucks website. Its masthead: \u201cReading SUCKS! until\u2026 A unique book\u2013a vital tool for literacy\u2013currently in production.\u201d Say what?! No novice to reading, I can barely make out what I\u2019ve just read, but subsequent sentences do clue me in: \u201cTeenagers who HATE to read will love this book\u2013and then actually want to read more books.\u201d And, \u201cReading SUCKS! will have short concise stories written by Hip-Hop artists, athletes, prison inmates, soldiers, and HS students.\u201d So this is an initiative to get teens to read, which is good, obviously, though it\u2019s interesting that actual writers are considered unenticing, a turn off to reading. Tales told by rappers, jocks and criminals are preferred to stories by trained fiction writers, but part of the problem must be pinned on these same writers, for too many of them have spent their entire adult lives cloistered in universities. Since they barely associate with anyone unlike themselves, they hardly make sense outside the academy, and here I\u2019m talking as much about emotional as literal sense. They can\u2019t grasp what\u2019s urgent to ordinary folks.<\/p>\n
To those who still think of American universities as hotbeds of radicalism, please note that former boss of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, is now President of the University of California system; Condolezza Rice was recently a Provost of Stanford; Patriot Act co-author John Yoo teaches law at Berkeley; and even a well known \u201cliberal\u201d school like Bard is run by an Israel apologist, Leon Bostein. At many colleges, professors may be disproportionately Democrats, but that just shows the limits of American dissent. Protesting, they voted for Clinton then Obama, two war criminals, and to prove how really progressive they are, they\u2019ll vote for the next Democratic mass murderer. Yes, the university will allow you to cross dress and rage against all the wrongs done to your subgroup, for this serves their divide-and-rule scheme, but don\u2019t think too hard about what\u2019s destroying us all.<\/p>\n
So the ones who more or less know spelling, grammar and syntax are out of touch, while the foot soldiers on the ground are stuck on \u201cYou know what I\u2019m sayin\u2019,\u201d \u201cJust sayin\u2019\u201d and \u201cAye.\u201d Of course, the entire culture has been dumbed down to a frightening degree. According to the Journal of American Medical Association, 46% of American adults cannot comprehend the label on their prescription medicine, and The National Center for Education Statistics reports that half of our adults cannot read an 8th grade level book. Since most Americans no longer read much of anything beyond emails, texts and twitters, we should rejoice, I suppose, at each instance of book reading, though in a place like North Philly, they\u2019re not soaking up Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Etheridge Knight or Sonia Sanchez, the last two Philly products, but Demettrea, Ca$h, Jazmyne or homeboy Brian Harrison, author of the novel Sugar to Shit (not to be confused with the website, though everything has gone from high fructose corn syrup to high fructose corn syrup). Here\u2019s how Harrison defines himself, \u201cHaving an inner-city background and a suburban education, he combines these two forces and erupts in shear, flawless, diamond-like quality classics. While in the lowest moments of his life, surrounded by disaster and heartache, Brian Harrison narrowly finds his escape and turns his experience into an explicit, mind-blowing novel tht has never been told like this before.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jamilla thinks she\u2019s \u201cToo Sexy and Too freaking smart,\u201d and Harrison considers his novel a \u201cflawless, diamond-like quality classic.\u201d After leaving Broad Street Tavern, I saw a man in his early 30\u2019s wearing this T-shirt, \u201cI NEVER CEASE TO AMAZE MYSELF,\u201d and he wasn\u2019t being goofy, \u201cIt\u2019s true, I amaze myself every day.\u201d Seeing that I was interested in his shirt, he even told me where I could get one, for only $3. How fitting that in a crumbling society that still stridently trumpets itself as number one, you\u2019ll run into so many insanely narcissistic citizens with no sense of their shortcomings, though of course life will sucker punch you, good, even maim you thoroughly, until you learn what\u2019s what, and in a moment of silence, alone, you can also reflect on all the humbling, even terrifying, clues to your smallness. Too many of us, though, would rather shoo away lurking insights with endless noise, alcohol or drugs. Numb, we rely on the pounding beat as our pacemaker.<\/p>\n
Sorry, dude, to sound like some preacherman dropping Ecclesiastes. I best shut my grill. If you want religion, though, there\u2019s the Universal Church just a block from here. Sometimes they have, ah, Holy Oil from Israel and shit, and if you\u2019ve been hexed by witchcraft, the evil eye, envy or just plain bad luck, they can also fix you up and shit.<\/p>\n
The first time I came to North Philly, I visited Etheridge Knight. I bought a yellow tin of jasmine tea. He fed me pork chops. This was in 1984, when I was dumber than dirt, naturally, though I had somehow managed to be featured with Knight in a poetry reading. This was at the Bacchanal, now long dead. Underaged, I had shown up on Mondays for their open readings. Speaking English not even a decade, I was presumptuous enough to think of myself an American poet, but then many young people see stardom in their future. They won\u2019t just be good, but the best. An Oakland middle school teacher chuckled, \u201cAll of my kids think they\u2019ll be stars,\u201d and she taught 151 of them.<\/p>\n
\u201cA star at what?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t know, but they\u2019ll be stars!\u201d<\/p>\n
As Mike Tyson observed, \u201cThey all suck, but they all think they\u2019re superstars!\u201d (That\u2019s not an exact quotation, by the way, since I\u2019ve long lost that Ring Magazine.) So all these young\u2019uns start out with visions of themselves as a future champ, CEO, kingpin or kick ass artist, but these hallucinations are quickly revised downward, until they find themselves pondering their spare change for the longest time, fidgeting, frowning and taking deep breaths, before deciding, finally, to buy that day-old donut. In 1984, I still thought that the right combination of words could wake up and transport everyone, bank tellers, bus drivers, butchers, and I was loco enough to think I had been chosen for the job. In any case, I had written so few poems by then, I could memorize them all. With my eyes closed, I\u2019d recite without paper, clutching a beer bottle. The applause pumped up my confidence, and after a few weeks of this schtick, the organizer had me read with Knight. That night, as I was drinking a Rolling Rock at the bar, Etheridge ambled over.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou ready?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you a poet?\u201d<\/p>\n
Annoyed, I stared at the man, \u201cI\u2019m reading with you and I\u2019m not a poet?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJust answer me. Are you a poet?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course I\u2019m a poet!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOK, so let\u2019s go read then!\u201d<\/p>\n
That was the old fox\u2019s way to get me riled up, and it worked. Later, Etheridge would jokingly call me \u201cprofessor,\u201d for my jejune seriousness, I suppose. I have never earned a college degree, and neither did Etheridge until 1990, the year before he died. Knowing Etheridge was very sick, I phoned him in Indiana.<\/p>\n
\u201cGoodbye, Etheridge.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGoodbye, professor.\u201d<\/p>\n
And goodbye, North Philly, at least for now, and let\u2019s end with Etheridge\u2019s words:<\/p>\n
My life, the quality of which<\/em> Linh Dinh<\/b><\/em>\u00a0is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate. He\u2019s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog,\u00a0State of the Union<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n
From the moment<\/em>
My father grunted and comed<\/em>
Until now<\/em>
As the sounds of my words<\/em>
Bruise your ears<\/em>
IS<\/em>
And can be felt<\/em>
In the one word: DESPERATION<\/em>
But you have to feel for it.<\/em><\/p>\n